Is your anger controlling you?
Fear enslaving you?
Guilt suppressing you?
Love imprisoning you?
Disgust trapping you?
Okay, so get ready for the main question now!
Are your emotions controlling you?
If yes or partly yes, I would advise you to know and have a better hold on them.
So let’s start understanding them without any further ado.
Our Goal: To control our emotions and not let emotions control us
What are emotions?
Emotions are a complex state of feelings which affect us psychologically and physically, thus influencing our thought process and behavior. In simple terms, these are a driving force to our actions, behaviors, and decisions.
As soon as we sense(touch, taste, see, hear, etc )something, the stimulus shapes the emotion subconsciously. Once the emotion is formed (which happens in split seconds ), it gets exhibited in the form of our outward actions.
Many of us are often confused between emotions and feelings. Let’s take a quick look at the slight difference which we all miss.
Emotion Vs Feeling
“Emotions are autonomous bodily responses to certain external or internal events generated subconsciously”, while “Feelings are subjective experiences of emotions and are driven by conscious thoughts and reflections.” ( iMotions, 2015).
For example, It’s your birthday. You get a lot of presents, warm wishes from uncles, aunties, and elders. You dance, jump, play, sing, and have a lot of fun with your cousins and friends.
Obviously, the emotion associated is Joy. The adjectives used to express the feelings are happy, excited, wonderful, good, great, etc. You see, we can’t really define what is ‘Joy’. If we do define also, those definitions are subjective. So these subjective definitions are feelings, while the core is an Emotion.
Why do we need to learn about emotions, why is it important for one to know?
Lets checkout 3 reasons why
1.Emotions help us know ourselves
Understanding emotions help us know what we like and dislike, what we enjoy and what we hate doing, what we love, what we don’t, what we are comfortable with, and what we are not. Studying them and noticing them help us to become emotionally fit.
Did you ever wonder why you get easily irritated or throw a tantrum though you don’t like or know that it will affect the other person? Hmm, I’m sure you all did, I did too. All of this is the underlying power of emotions. But that’s okay, we can learn to understand them and be better informed about why we do a certain way. Not only that but we can also control our actions.
2.Emotions give a sense of direction to our life.
Many times we hear teenagers or young adults explaining to their parents – “Ma, this is where my heart is, I feel happy doing this….”
You see, emotions help us acknowledge our passion and work towards it.
On the contrary, when we don’t take care of our emotions or listen to them, we get messy and slowly start becoming or portraying a false image. This might be very unhealthy and problematic in the long run.
3. Emotions are like a stimulus, they direct us towards action
To put it simply, we run when we are afraid, jump when excited, ramble/fidget when worried, etc. In a much larger context, emotions enable us to grab what we need in life, work hard towards what we want and avoid situations we are uncomfortable in.
So unless we understand our emotions and have intimate access to them, we won’t be able to know and do what we want to. Therefore emotions direct our actions.
Hope you all understood how important it is to dig deep and take care of our inner self, the emotions, and its impact in our day to day lives.
This is just part one of the Emotion Expression series, I will be back with Part – 2, where we will discuss how we can track our emotions and step forward to becoming an emotionally intelligent individual. Good-day Friends!
References: iMotions, 2015, What Are Emotions And Why Do They Matter?, Available at https://imotions.com/blog/emotions-matter/
